If I’m Honest about … waiting
Years ago, I asked my dad, ‘Do you think I’m impatient?’
He looked at me for a long five seconds, so I prompted him. ‘Well? Do you?’
He smiled. ‘I think you just answered your own question.’
Patience is a virtue I was not gifted, but lately I’ve been wondering if my impatience is actually a personality trait or simply what happens to women who’ve spent a lifetime waiting—for our turn, for kids to sleep, for pay rises, for someone else to finish talking so we can finally say the thing we’ve been holding in, for a season of life where our time is ours.
Mothers alone have spent years just waiting to go to the toilet without an audience, for Pete’s sake.
It’s the end of January, and we’re on the final tip of the summer school holidays. These weeks are meant to be restorative. Long, slow days and balmy, late nights. No alarms, no sports schedules or work meetings. But like all good things, they end in paperwork and logistics.
As I prepared all the admin and bullshit for the kids to return to school, today’s adventure was the uniform shop. Senior school requires a different uniform to junior school, because nothing says educational continuity like forcing parents to repurchase the same outfit in slightly altered form. All I I needed was two white polos. (Why they chose to make them white is a mystery and clearly whoever decided that has never washed teenage clothing.)
My daughter and I stood in a line in 44-degree heat waiting for the shop to open.
We waited.
And waited.
Forty minutes after opening time, the uniform staff arrived to a sunburnt crowd of irritated parents and teenagers (who already resented the idea that they had to think about school on their final day of holidays).
No please, take your time, I have plenty to spare.
I tried to contain my frustration. I’m a reasonable, albeit impatient, person. I know shit happens. Cars break down, kids get sick, life blows. But I was unable to offset that against the fact this company charges through the roof, they service multiple schools, drive BMWs, and no doubt pay pittance to the poor overseas workers sewing the garments. For some reason, I’d made the dangerous mistake of expecting competence. And punctuality.
So, they arrived late and then didn’t have the polo in my daughter’s size. I waited around while other parents argued about online orders that hadn’t arrived. Teenagers sweated in silent hostility. The air was thick with that uniquely human cocktail of heat, inconvenience, and the insight that this situation was incredibly petty in the context of the world, but fundamentally infuriating in this moment.
We finally left (with 2x small polos they found in the boot of their BMW, huzzah!) to join the traffic heading to the supermarket, then joined more queues to do the back-to-school food shopping. When I got home, I called the insurance company for a quote, and waited on hold for another thirty minutes.
That’s when it hit me. It’s not the waiting that makes people impatient. It’s the feeling that our time doesn’t matter.
Maybe it’s midlife that stirs the intolerance because time feels different now. When I was younger, it felt abundant. Stretchy (like my body used to be). The distance between birthdays seemed endless, and as a kid, waiting was mildly annoying, but not existential.
Now I know time is a non-renewable resource. I am acutely aware that the hours I spend standing in lines, sitting in traffic, or waiting on hold are hours of a finite life. Hours I could have been resting, walking, thinking, just being a person separate from everyone else’s needs. Time I could have been writing.
And it’s writing, of all things, that has taught me the strangest lesson about waiting. That sometimes waiting isn’t a delay, it’s part of the work. Publishing is synonymous with waiting. It’s a long game, one that demands faith (bordering on delusion). You wait for feedback, for agents, for editors, for contracts, for edits, for covers, for release dates. You wait in anticipation while something you poured yourself into slowly makes its way through invisible systems you cannot rush. But that kind of waiting feels different. It’s purposeful and tethered to hope. A slow burn in service of something you chose. Rather than stealing my time, it invests in it.
The difference, I think, is choice. As a mother, so much of my time has never belonged to me. It has been sliced, allocated, volunteered, absorbed. School forms, appointments, uniforms, birthday gifts, permission slips. The mental tabs open in my brain could crash a laptop. Yes, it’s an investment in my children and their safe and hopefully joyous upbringing, but I am yet to see how so much of the bullshit admin makes anyone’s life more fulfilled.
So, when I’m made to wait—unnecessarily, inefficiently, dismissively—for mundane things like uniform or groceries, it feels like a small theft. I can’t complain, because that makes me a ‘Karen’, so I quietly accept another withdrawal from an account that’s already overdrawn.
Which is how I’ve come to understand impatience differently. Impatience is a signal for a nervous system finally saying my time has value too. That women in midlife aren’t suddenly less tolerant, instead we’ve simply reached the stage where the cost of waiting has become visible. It’s the sudden dawning that I don’t actually want to spend what’s left of my life waiting for systems that don’t work and people who didn’t plan.
I’ll wait for my kids, for my friends, for publishing contracts and test results, for the things that matter, but I’m less willing to accept waiting because someone else didn’t think my time was worth protecting.
Maybe that’s wisdom, finally arriving, forty minutes late, in the heat.
Kylie
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